Colors
by Aria Marier
Summary: Sometimes, people are more than who they are. Sometimes, they are what they mean, instead. A short oneshot based on a drabble on the jouloveskaiba lij community. Joukai, short, introspective.


**_Title: Colors _**

**_Author: _**Aria Marier

_**Pairing: **_Jou/Kaiba

**_Rating: _**G

**_Spoilers: _**None (unless you count what Kaiba wears during Duelist Kingdom)

**_Disclaimer: _**I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh! Which is sad for me, but probably good for the anime world.

**_Summary: _**Based on a flash of inspiration I got from shaki86. Jou thinks about his friends, and what they mean.

* * *

_**Colors**_

Sometimes, when he's alone and the room is quiet, Jou likes to think what his friends remind him of. Sometimes he thinks of tastes (Honda is like mocha—simple and dependable; Anzu is mint—sweet and just a little sharp), sometimes he thinks of smells (Otogi always makes him think of opening a new carton of orange juice—tangy and fresh), sometimes he thinks of images (Yugi will forever be locked in Jou's head with an image of bright sunny afternoons and the sinking feeling that he can always do better), and sometimes he thinks of weather (that one is easy: Yugi is a bright sunny day, Kaiba is the snap of a clear autumn wind, Honda is Domino's slightly muggy summer, Anzu is a fresh spring shower, Bakura is a moody gray November day, gorgeous in its grayness, Shizuka the sweetness spring after winter, Mai is the flamboyant glory of late summer, the other Yugi a snapping heat-induced thunderstorm).

Tonight, laying on his bed, idly flipping through his deck while he kicks his socked feet slowly, he is thinking of colors.

Yugi, first.

(Always Yugi, first.)

Yugi is yellow, cheerful and bright, childlike in its simplicity, marvelous in its ability to brighten up even the grayest of tones.

Honda...Honda is deep green, calm and steady, with just the slightest tone of gray to it. Because, Jou is realizing now that he doesn't really know Honda anymore, and is beginning to question whether he ever knew him in the first place.

But continuing.

Mai. He thought Mai would be purple, her favorite color, but after thinking it over, he decided she wasn't, after all. No, Mai is blue. A brilliant, incandescent peacock blue that shimmers with colors too quickly to describe, like Mai shimmers with life and energy, too quickly for Jou to ever really catch up with. When he is with Mai, her life and her color, her laugh and her skill, her independence, impresses him to no end. He wishes he could be as brilliant as Mai, but accepts the reflected light as gracefully as he can, catching it while she is there, because all too soon she is gone again.

It is the other Yugi that is purple in Jou's mind—rich, thick purple, the color or royalty, because Jou knows, on some level, that even if the other Yugi isn't an ancient Pharoah, and even if they never find his name, he is still the embodiment of royalty, and so, he is purple. The color of his eyes, of Yugi's eyes; the color his hair is edged with; the color of the shadows that surround his games with Bakura, or Pegasus, or Malik. Jou doesn't always trust the other Yugi, but he is drawn to his power, impressed by his royalty, and, in the end, loves him as much as he loves his own, familiar, Yugi.

Anzu, next. He thinks about Anzu longer than he would have expected, before deciding that her color is undeniably pink. Pink like freshly blushing cheeks, like the trim of the Black Magician Girl's hat, like the first wild roses of summer. The pink that is Anzu isn't store-bought and over-used, it is fresh and clean and sweet and simple, just like Anzu herself.

Bakura is easy, Bakura is white, like his hair, like his soft sweaters, like the pureness of his soul. But Bakura is inhabited by a demon, a demon that Jou names as 'black', accepting that within Bakura live these two opposite forces. Although Bakura isn't an extreme person, his personalities must embrace the extremes that they are, and so within Bakura are black and white, and as far as Jou can tell, they exist without either destroying each other or swallowing each other up. So must such a balance be.

Otogi is green, like Honda, but not a warm, deep, confusing green. Otogi is green like his eyes, grass-green, poison-green, if you want to think of it that way. The green that Jou sees when he thinks of Otogi is clear and bright, the way Otogi shines, whether he is by himself or in a crowd, like the green of a traffic light, with a lamp glowing behind it. A color you cannot help but notice.

Thinking of Otogi and Honda leads him to a smile as he considers what color Shizuka is. He is tempted to say she is copper, like her hair, but that seems trite, and she isn't the calm blue of her eyes, either. To Jou, Shizuka is the shifting colors of pebbles seen through stream water, never one solid color, but always the same beautiful amber tones, calm and lovely.

The colors are getting harder, or perhaps the people are getting harder. Jou lets his eyes rest for a moment, looking fuzzily into the space a few inches from his cards. He knows who is coming next, he thinks he knows the color but he isn't quite sure, because all the colors he would have automatically used for Kaiba—blue, white, black—have all been taken. No matter that Kaiba would be a kind of cerulean blue, bright and cool as an autumn sky instead of Mai's flashy peacock, no matter that his white would have more of a silver tinge than Bakura's pure cloud, snow white, no matter that his black would be star-speckled and cold instead of Bakura's demons coal, ink, volcanic black.

He supposed, if he had to be pinned down, Kaiba would be the shifting azure of his Blue Eyes White Dragon's scales—like Shizuka and Mai, not one color, but many. He was hesitant to say that Kaiba is, as he always seems to be, merely blue, but the scales are not blue, nor are they truly silver, white, or black. They flex and shade with the same chameleon effect that Kaiba himself employs, and that is Kaiba, always, but Jou thinks that the color that represents him best is when the light hits the blue eyes of the Blue Eyes just right and they absorb it to become a clear swirl of deep aquamarine, like the silky shirt Kaiba wore to Duelist Kingdom, like the clear ocean water Jou remembered diving into to save Yugi's card, like the deep ocean water Jou remembered falling into after he had woken from Malik's dream. Deep, and cold, and clear aquamarine.

The light from his window is slanting across his bed now, dusty gold in the late autumn afternoon, and he thinks it'll hit just right, so he sits up and leans across to where the head of the other person on his bed is, near his feet, while lean legs in black pants stretch up towards him. The bed shifts as he sits up and flops over onto his knees so he can walk on them to the end of his bed, careful not to disturb the angle of the light and where it hits, and sits back down, cross-legged with his knee brushing a silky shirt, and shakes the shoulder softly.

And the color—when the light hits those blue eyes just right, and they clear into aquamarine—Jou grins, and knows he knows that color that represents Kaiba best.


End file.
